It took a while, but here it is:
(Text by Chris Bekhuis and Maurice Dam)
Last June a very fruitful travel to the United States was undertaken with many a progressive event. Elsewhere in this magazine you can read my report of the legendary NEARfest festival but prior to that we had the opportunity to talk to the legendary progressive masters of Happy The Man. Keyboardist Frank Wyatt (FW) was kind enough to invite us to his house allowing us to chat about the bands current affairs and past ventures. Happy The Man guitarist Stanley Whitaker (SW) also joined the party making it a very entertaining afternoon.
How were the reactions on the new album?
SW: “We have had mostly good positive reactions to the album. There have been a handful of folks that like the heavier prog stuff and for some of those this album is a bit too light fare. But then, “Contemporary insanity”, “Barking spiders”, “Il quinto mare”… the heavier tunes they love those.”
FW: “We have always had a diverse series of compositions though. There are always the mellow ones and the rockers and the more symphonic rock type stuff. That is just the natural result of having three writers.”
Is it difficult to have so many different writers in the band?
SW: “Nah, it’s great cause it gives us a lot of tunes to choose from when we are getting ready to do a new album. It just gives us that more stuff to decide which ones we really want to work on.”
FW: “That the most fun part anyway, working up the new material. All the rest is well… playing live is the second best but the most fun is when you are coming with an idea into the rehearsal room and say “He listen to this !!” and then you play and someone else says “Ah yeah… and then check this out!” and adds their part. It’s starting to evolve into a song and gets fleshed out. That’s the fun part for me.”
SW: “I have to put live above that.”
FW: “For me that comes next. I am not as frightened when working up this stuff as when I am going to perform.”
SW: [chuckles]
It took you five years to complete The Muse Awakens
FW: “Yeah... we had some drummer issues.”
SW: “Some drum chair changes that set us back every time that happened. Also, none of us, except for Frank and I, are living in the same city. It’s just tough getting everybody in the same room together. It’s so hard to schedule rehearsal time. That’s the main reason.”
FW: “Logistics.”
Drummers seem to be a big problem for Happy The Man, past and present?
SW: “It’s our Spinal Tap Syndrome there. We never had a drummer who did two albums in a row. I think Joe Bergamini is going to be the first one to actually achieve just that, breaking that curse. Because he is just way into it and will surely be there for the next one.”
FW: “e is just a great fit with the rest of the group.”
SW: “or us he is just the best of all three drummers we have had. He has a got a lot of elements of both Mike Beck and Ron Riddle and even Coco Roussel and yet he also got his own flair and style. For our music he just turned out to be the best percussionist we have ever worked with.”
FW: “He is a very intelligent drummer.”
SW: “And he likes to rehearse. A lot of our drummers did not like to practice and just wanted to show up for the gigs and play. But Joe is just like us and wants to play it over and over again until it is a nice fine polished gem and then he is consistent… he plays is the same way live. So we are not worried about a section coming up thinking ‘God, what is he going to do here?’.”
The 2000 NEARfest gig was actually the first you played with Ron Riddle right?
SW: “When we did “Crafty Hands” he came on a couple months before, recorded the record and right after it he got off with Blue Öyster Cult.”
FW: “That’s when the band split up anyway.”
SW: “Yes, the band was breaking up at that time. While we were recording this album we found out from Arista that we were being dropped. And that is the main reason why we never got to playing with at that time.”
FW: “And he is great fun to play with though... He is a really energetic drummer. He is an animal on drums and that is his nickname actually “The Animal”.”
SW: “A lot of fun to play with. For us it is a bit daunting cause we are on the edge of our seats as we don’t know what he is going to do next. When he starts this drum fill I was standing their thinking ‘God, I hope he ends up on the 1 !!’ Wherever the one may be of course with Happy The Man music. It’s maybe a bit too much excitement and spontaneity for our music.”
The other “new” member of the band, David Rosenthal, seems to fit in with band just as well.
FW: “Dave is so good he just fits in with any band he might join. He can listen to anybody and that absorbs that and can sound just like that.“
SW: “Lucky for us Happy The Man was his favorite band, kinda of all times actually. So when he was up Berklee and friends of his like Steve Vai were transcribing Frank Zappa tunes, Dave was doing the same with Happy The Man tunes.”
Aah... so now you have the sheet music for those.
SW: “Yeah, we didn’t write the stuff out in those days. I first met him after Happy The Man when I had this band with our bass player Rick Kennell called Vision and he showed up at one of our gigs in New York with a bunch of our tunes fully written out. He couldn’t believe that we didn’t write out the stuff. We didn’t do that in those days, way too much work.”
How does Dave Rosenthal find the time to fit HTM in to his busy schedule?
SW: “It’s been hard and that’s why it took so long. The first 2 or 3 years after we had reformed he was still playing out with Billy Joel. So that made scheduling rehearsals and working up new material even more difficult. But the past couple of years he hasn’t done that as much so that has freed up his schedule quite a bit more for us to hook up with him.“
FW: “We worked up the songs at Dave’s house in New Jersey. Stan and I were driving 9 hours each way to these rehearsals. So, you can’t do that too much without burning up. I guess we did it for six months or so. And then Stan moved up further north to the Baltimore area. But I wasn’t going to be the only one driving 9 hours so I sold everything I had and moved up too. Which actually turned out to be a very good decision.”
SW: “Things we sacrifice for this band. Hahaha…”
When you decided to reform, weren’t you scared about whether the material you had written was still up to classic 70s material you had released?
SW: “Most of the next record is already written. A lot of that is Frank’s stuff. We go through a whole democratic process of weeding through everybody’s songs, deciding which songs we love and want to start working on for the next record. So most of the songs for that album have been written now and a lot of that is Frank’s stuff and has lyrics to them. So they gotta let me sing a little more.”
That’s a thing with HTM’s music, there aren’t that many songs with vocals but the ones that do have them are really excellent.
FW: “In the old days we had Clift Fortney, the first HTM singer. And then he couldn’t deal with the stage fright or something like that. Then we had Dan Owens and then he didn’t last. So Stan was always sorta filling in as the vocalist because our real vocalist was gone. So we decided to go all instrumental. But it’s just not gonna cut it with being all instrumental. The music is just not accessible enough and you can’t communicate everything you want to. I have these big concept ideas and sometimes you can’t draw the picture you have without using words. We are now finally in a situation where Stan has worked, worked and worked on his vocals and we feel it is good enough now to explore that direction.”
SW: “I was very much the reluctant singer in the old days. Just when we went all instrumental Arista was willing to sign but they flat out told us that if you guys don’t start singing we are probably not gonna sign you. But if we, Arista, have even a bit of hope that there is going to be some vocals we will sign you.”
FW: “So Stan became the singer.”
SW: “And that’s how I started singing because no one else wanted to do it. But then I discovered I really liked singing and the past 25 / 30 years since then I really got into singing, worked at it and made it more my craft. Actually by the time we broke up I really started to like singing and we worked up some more vocal tunes some it got out on “Third / Better Late…” but alas we broke up.”
Any chance some of that “Third / Better Late” material might be worked up for a proper release?
FW: “We thought about doing that and Bill Plummer wanted to remix and remaster it. I called Kit Watkins because all we had was the original 4-track tape and that is lost, destroyed or died or whatever old tapes do. So there are no multi-tracks available anymore. It could however be treated from the 2-track master so it could be re-EQ and remastered which would make it sound better. Bill actually did the one song, “Chrome yellow”, and it really sounds better. So we might do that.”
But no plans to basically re-record it?
FW: “I don’t think we would do that. We have this huge volume of new material.”
SW: “Too much new stuff.”
FW: “We already have this whole other album of material after the next album practically but I don’t know... another band called Spirit Noise might just do that.”
So Pedal Giant Animals is not the real name anymore?
FW: “That’s the name of the project Stan and I did with Chris Mack (Iluvatar) doing the drums. But that has now evolved into a band with a different bass player and with Bill Plummer, the Happy The Man soundman, on keyboards along with me and Stan. We thought we would call it PGA but then it’s not really the same thing. It is a new band with new music so we have been tossing names around. At this moment it seems like Spirit Noise, a name Stan came up with is going to be the one.”
What’s the musical direction of Spirit Noise?
FW: “It’s like HTM kinda music, more loose. We have some improvisations.”
SW: “It’s certainly different from the material that can be found online. That was more acoustic, duo type stuff and this has a bit more ‘Oomph’. Some of the material that was going to be intended for Pedal Giant Animals is being reworked for Spirit Noise. Some it was more vocal-orientated but still HTM-esque but somehow didn’t get through the whole HTM band process. And that’s where the whole PGA project started because we thought these songs were too good to waste.”
FW: “We weren’t happy with them just throwing them away. We wanted to get them recorded one way or the other so we do it ourselves. So we did do them as PGA recording them in Stan’s bedroom and the quality of the recording isn’t as good as it could have been since we didn’t have that much of a budget.”
Which bring us to HTM signing with InsideOut America.
SW: “Well, we are actually signed to the German company. Chad and Rob of NEARfest were somehow liaisons for InsideOut and when we were playing the Progday Festival in North Carolina they came down representing InsideOut telling us that they wanted us to make an offer. And we jumped on that one because we had intended to do it ourselves probably taking the Marillion-route, trying to get some financing that way.
FW: I don’t know if we would have been as successful as Marillion.”
How has the album done so far sales-wise?
FW: “It certainly has done better in Europe then over here
SW: “Probably around 7000 copies of it have been sold so far, looks like 4000 in Europe and 3000 in the US. It’s not nearly as many as we have hoped for but if we can get out and doing some kind of tour. Hopefully getting to your country and getting some more exposure in Europe is really our biggest hope of being really some kind of success with this band. Apparently a lot of our fans come from Holland, Germany and Italy and most of the interviews we have done were for magazines, websites etc. from that area. We have hardly done any US interviews at all.”
FW: “I don’t know if we did any, did we?”
SW: “One or two. There were a couple, for Progression and for Expose Magazine. But that’s it. Europe is definitely more our audience, they know how to listen. And not to demean the progfans in the US because they know how to listen but there just don’t seem to be as many of them anymore.
What surprised us the most that, from the info we got through the interviews we did for a lot of the German magazines and websites, is that we continually are spoken off in the same breath and the same regard as King Crimson, Genesis etc.”
FW: “We really, really, really want to play in Europe.”
One way to get a bit more exposure these days is to release a live-DVD.
SW: “We are working on that. We have footage of a few shows. We will have part of this interview on there for sure. Steve, our buddy, taped the XM Satellite Radio session yesterday, so we have got that footage. We filmed a couple of our shows like at the State Theater, so there is some footage out there but not as much with Joe, the new drummer, as we would like. So probably in September we will put on our own production in the area and have the whole DVD crew in there and film a whole performance. So yes, we desperately need a live-dvd out there to show other people that we do exist.”
FW: “That is something we are really doing on our own, no real budget.”
How do you think the songs fare on stage compared to the studio counterparts?
SW: “Oh, I think they come over better live. Some of the songs and the rockers for sure are great live: “Contemporary insanity” and “Barking spiders” and their ilk. But what was really neat was that the really soft ones like “Adrift” and “Maui sunset” really come to live on stage.”
FW: “They don’t seem too much easy listening when it’s done live.”
SW: “On the record they are mistakenly put in to the new-agey category.”
FW: “Ugh..”
What I did notice is that you changed the order of the songs compared to the promos that were sent out. I kind of liked the whole vibe at the end of the album, which was really dreamy.
SW: “We switched “Maui sunset” and “Kindred spirits” I think. We thought “Kindred spirit” didn’t work as well early in the album.”
FW: “Yes that was it. So does that make the promos worth something?”
How much did the original compositions as written by the writers in the band change when you worked them up for the recording?
SW: “Oh yeah, they always do change, evolve because we are all perfectionists and are trying to get our individual parts to the optimum part that they can be. We are pretty anal on getting things to that final polished state. Who ever writes the song, their part pretty much stays the same. So when Frank or me write a song and present it to the band our individual part pretty much stays the same but it is everybody else’s part that seems to evolve a lot in the arrangement process. We let everyone in the band pretty much come up with their own parts but if we as a composer have something specific in our head we throw that at them too to see if they would try this little twist on that. We really do try out every little angle and tempo to get things to their optimum.”
So does a track sometimes come out totally different then you had initially thought?
FW: “Always. It is always better then I thought it would be initially. When I write a piece I hear the piano part and when I think it is cool I bring to the band. And then it goes through this arrangement-process and it just becomes way better then it was originally.”
SW: “Frank’s tunes are probably the most challenging for us to work up just because they are eeuh…”
FW: “… so weird” [laughs]
SW: “He has what we call Frank chords. A lot of his chords are simply not real chords [chuckles], they don’t have names or if they did it is something like C-sharp diminished flat five 711 sharp 13 over a B-flat base. They are just amazing chords and some of them for me as a guitar player are really fun and challenging to figure out what the hell he wants. His tunes are a lot of fun to work out.”
FW: “They do take a long time to work out.”
SW: “Yes, they take longer but that is good because the end result is pretty amazing. My tunes are a bit more straightforward, more verse-chorus verse-chorus.”
FW: “But with Stan’s tunes, he comes in and plays it and then he will map out his drum part, his rhythm idea and it turns out to be something completely different then you thought it would be. And you are really scratching your head...”
SW: “Yeah, I have a lot of drum ideas.”
FW: “His ideas are just off-the-wall but they sound really good you know.”
Ah, so that is the reason why you can’t hold on to your drummers because you got yourself a frustrated drummer cum guitar player?
FW: “We did have this one drummer leaving saying: “There are too many drummers in this band!”. But hey, everybody gets it equally from us. We are all tough on each other. Everyone’s part gets the same scrutiny. Basically, if you are married to your part you couldn’t work in this band. You got to be flexible.”
(continued...)
(Text by Chris Bekhuis and Maurice Dam)
Last June a very fruitful travel to the United States was undertaken with many a progressive event. Elsewhere in this magazine you can read my report of the legendary NEARfest festival but prior to that we had the opportunity to talk to the legendary progressive masters of Happy The Man. Keyboardist Frank Wyatt (FW) was kind enough to invite us to his house allowing us to chat about the bands current affairs and past ventures. Happy The Man guitarist Stanley Whitaker (SW) also joined the party making it a very entertaining afternoon.
How were the reactions on the new album?
SW: “We have had mostly good positive reactions to the album. There have been a handful of folks that like the heavier prog stuff and for some of those this album is a bit too light fare. But then, “Contemporary insanity”, “Barking spiders”, “Il quinto mare”… the heavier tunes they love those.”
FW: “We have always had a diverse series of compositions though. There are always the mellow ones and the rockers and the more symphonic rock type stuff. That is just the natural result of having three writers.”
Is it difficult to have so many different writers in the band?
SW: “Nah, it’s great cause it gives us a lot of tunes to choose from when we are getting ready to do a new album. It just gives us that more stuff to decide which ones we really want to work on.”
FW: “That the most fun part anyway, working up the new material. All the rest is well… playing live is the second best but the most fun is when you are coming with an idea into the rehearsal room and say “He listen to this !!” and then you play and someone else says “Ah yeah… and then check this out!” and adds their part. It’s starting to evolve into a song and gets fleshed out. That’s the fun part for me.”
SW: “I have to put live above that.”
FW: “For me that comes next. I am not as frightened when working up this stuff as when I am going to perform.”
SW: [chuckles]
It took you five years to complete The Muse Awakens
FW: “Yeah... we had some drummer issues.”
SW: “Some drum chair changes that set us back every time that happened. Also, none of us, except for Frank and I, are living in the same city. It’s just tough getting everybody in the same room together. It’s so hard to schedule rehearsal time. That’s the main reason.”
FW: “Logistics.”
Drummers seem to be a big problem for Happy The Man, past and present?
SW: “It’s our Spinal Tap Syndrome there. We never had a drummer who did two albums in a row. I think Joe Bergamini is going to be the first one to actually achieve just that, breaking that curse. Because he is just way into it and will surely be there for the next one.”
FW: “e is just a great fit with the rest of the group.”
SW: “or us he is just the best of all three drummers we have had. He has a got a lot of elements of both Mike Beck and Ron Riddle and even Coco Roussel and yet he also got his own flair and style. For our music he just turned out to be the best percussionist we have ever worked with.”
FW: “He is a very intelligent drummer.”
SW: “And he likes to rehearse. A lot of our drummers did not like to practice and just wanted to show up for the gigs and play. But Joe is just like us and wants to play it over and over again until it is a nice fine polished gem and then he is consistent… he plays is the same way live. So we are not worried about a section coming up thinking ‘God, what is he going to do here?’.”
The 2000 NEARfest gig was actually the first you played with Ron Riddle right?
SW: “When we did “Crafty Hands” he came on a couple months before, recorded the record and right after it he got off with Blue Öyster Cult.”
FW: “That’s when the band split up anyway.”
SW: “Yes, the band was breaking up at that time. While we were recording this album we found out from Arista that we were being dropped. And that is the main reason why we never got to playing with at that time.”
FW: “And he is great fun to play with though... He is a really energetic drummer. He is an animal on drums and that is his nickname actually “The Animal”.”
SW: “A lot of fun to play with. For us it is a bit daunting cause we are on the edge of our seats as we don’t know what he is going to do next. When he starts this drum fill I was standing their thinking ‘God, I hope he ends up on the 1 !!’ Wherever the one may be of course with Happy The Man music. It’s maybe a bit too much excitement and spontaneity for our music.”
The other “new” member of the band, David Rosenthal, seems to fit in with band just as well.
FW: “Dave is so good he just fits in with any band he might join. He can listen to anybody and that absorbs that and can sound just like that.“
SW: “Lucky for us Happy The Man was his favorite band, kinda of all times actually. So when he was up Berklee and friends of his like Steve Vai were transcribing Frank Zappa tunes, Dave was doing the same with Happy The Man tunes.”
Aah... so now you have the sheet music for those.
SW: “Yeah, we didn’t write the stuff out in those days. I first met him after Happy The Man when I had this band with our bass player Rick Kennell called Vision and he showed up at one of our gigs in New York with a bunch of our tunes fully written out. He couldn’t believe that we didn’t write out the stuff. We didn’t do that in those days, way too much work.”
How does Dave Rosenthal find the time to fit HTM in to his busy schedule?
SW: “It’s been hard and that’s why it took so long. The first 2 or 3 years after we had reformed he was still playing out with Billy Joel. So that made scheduling rehearsals and working up new material even more difficult. But the past couple of years he hasn’t done that as much so that has freed up his schedule quite a bit more for us to hook up with him.“
FW: “We worked up the songs at Dave’s house in New Jersey. Stan and I were driving 9 hours each way to these rehearsals. So, you can’t do that too much without burning up. I guess we did it for six months or so. And then Stan moved up further north to the Baltimore area. But I wasn’t going to be the only one driving 9 hours so I sold everything I had and moved up too. Which actually turned out to be a very good decision.”
SW: “Things we sacrifice for this band. Hahaha…”
When you decided to reform, weren’t you scared about whether the material you had written was still up to classic 70s material you had released?
SW: “Most of the next record is already written. A lot of that is Frank’s stuff. We go through a whole democratic process of weeding through everybody’s songs, deciding which songs we love and want to start working on for the next record. So most of the songs for that album have been written now and a lot of that is Frank’s stuff and has lyrics to them. So they gotta let me sing a little more.”
That’s a thing with HTM’s music, there aren’t that many songs with vocals but the ones that do have them are really excellent.
FW: “In the old days we had Clift Fortney, the first HTM singer. And then he couldn’t deal with the stage fright or something like that. Then we had Dan Owens and then he didn’t last. So Stan was always sorta filling in as the vocalist because our real vocalist was gone. So we decided to go all instrumental. But it’s just not gonna cut it with being all instrumental. The music is just not accessible enough and you can’t communicate everything you want to. I have these big concept ideas and sometimes you can’t draw the picture you have without using words. We are now finally in a situation where Stan has worked, worked and worked on his vocals and we feel it is good enough now to explore that direction.”
SW: “I was very much the reluctant singer in the old days. Just when we went all instrumental Arista was willing to sign but they flat out told us that if you guys don’t start singing we are probably not gonna sign you. But if we, Arista, have even a bit of hope that there is going to be some vocals we will sign you.”
FW: “So Stan became the singer.”
SW: “And that’s how I started singing because no one else wanted to do it. But then I discovered I really liked singing and the past 25 / 30 years since then I really got into singing, worked at it and made it more my craft. Actually by the time we broke up I really started to like singing and we worked up some more vocal tunes some it got out on “Third / Better Late…” but alas we broke up.”
Any chance some of that “Third / Better Late” material might be worked up for a proper release?
FW: “We thought about doing that and Bill Plummer wanted to remix and remaster it. I called Kit Watkins because all we had was the original 4-track tape and that is lost, destroyed or died or whatever old tapes do. So there are no multi-tracks available anymore. It could however be treated from the 2-track master so it could be re-EQ and remastered which would make it sound better. Bill actually did the one song, “Chrome yellow”, and it really sounds better. So we might do that.”
But no plans to basically re-record it?
FW: “I don’t think we would do that. We have this huge volume of new material.”
SW: “Too much new stuff.”
FW: “We already have this whole other album of material after the next album practically but I don’t know... another band called Spirit Noise might just do that.”
So Pedal Giant Animals is not the real name anymore?
FW: “That’s the name of the project Stan and I did with Chris Mack (Iluvatar) doing the drums. But that has now evolved into a band with a different bass player and with Bill Plummer, the Happy The Man soundman, on keyboards along with me and Stan. We thought we would call it PGA but then it’s not really the same thing. It is a new band with new music so we have been tossing names around. At this moment it seems like Spirit Noise, a name Stan came up with is going to be the one.”
What’s the musical direction of Spirit Noise?
FW: “It’s like HTM kinda music, more loose. We have some improvisations.”
SW: “It’s certainly different from the material that can be found online. That was more acoustic, duo type stuff and this has a bit more ‘Oomph’. Some of the material that was going to be intended for Pedal Giant Animals is being reworked for Spirit Noise. Some it was more vocal-orientated but still HTM-esque but somehow didn’t get through the whole HTM band process. And that’s where the whole PGA project started because we thought these songs were too good to waste.”
FW: “We weren’t happy with them just throwing them away. We wanted to get them recorded one way or the other so we do it ourselves. So we did do them as PGA recording them in Stan’s bedroom and the quality of the recording isn’t as good as it could have been since we didn’t have that much of a budget.”
Which bring us to HTM signing with InsideOut America.
SW: “Well, we are actually signed to the German company. Chad and Rob of NEARfest were somehow liaisons for InsideOut and when we were playing the Progday Festival in North Carolina they came down representing InsideOut telling us that they wanted us to make an offer. And we jumped on that one because we had intended to do it ourselves probably taking the Marillion-route, trying to get some financing that way.
FW: I don’t know if we would have been as successful as Marillion.”
How has the album done so far sales-wise?
FW: “It certainly has done better in Europe then over here
SW: “Probably around 7000 copies of it have been sold so far, looks like 4000 in Europe and 3000 in the US. It’s not nearly as many as we have hoped for but if we can get out and doing some kind of tour. Hopefully getting to your country and getting some more exposure in Europe is really our biggest hope of being really some kind of success with this band. Apparently a lot of our fans come from Holland, Germany and Italy and most of the interviews we have done were for magazines, websites etc. from that area. We have hardly done any US interviews at all.”
FW: “I don’t know if we did any, did we?”
SW: “One or two. There were a couple, for Progression and for Expose Magazine. But that’s it. Europe is definitely more our audience, they know how to listen. And not to demean the progfans in the US because they know how to listen but there just don’t seem to be as many of them anymore.
What surprised us the most that, from the info we got through the interviews we did for a lot of the German magazines and websites, is that we continually are spoken off in the same breath and the same regard as King Crimson, Genesis etc.”
FW: “We really, really, really want to play in Europe.”
One way to get a bit more exposure these days is to release a live-DVD.
SW: “We are working on that. We have footage of a few shows. We will have part of this interview on there for sure. Steve, our buddy, taped the XM Satellite Radio session yesterday, so we have got that footage. We filmed a couple of our shows like at the State Theater, so there is some footage out there but not as much with Joe, the new drummer, as we would like. So probably in September we will put on our own production in the area and have the whole DVD crew in there and film a whole performance. So yes, we desperately need a live-dvd out there to show other people that we do exist.”
FW: “That is something we are really doing on our own, no real budget.”
How do you think the songs fare on stage compared to the studio counterparts?
SW: “Oh, I think they come over better live. Some of the songs and the rockers for sure are great live: “Contemporary insanity” and “Barking spiders” and their ilk. But what was really neat was that the really soft ones like “Adrift” and “Maui sunset” really come to live on stage.”
FW: “They don’t seem too much easy listening when it’s done live.”
SW: “On the record they are mistakenly put in to the new-agey category.”
FW: “Ugh..”
What I did notice is that you changed the order of the songs compared to the promos that were sent out. I kind of liked the whole vibe at the end of the album, which was really dreamy.
SW: “We switched “Maui sunset” and “Kindred spirits” I think. We thought “Kindred spirit” didn’t work as well early in the album.”
FW: “Yes that was it. So does that make the promos worth something?”
How much did the original compositions as written by the writers in the band change when you worked them up for the recording?
SW: “Oh yeah, they always do change, evolve because we are all perfectionists and are trying to get our individual parts to the optimum part that they can be. We are pretty anal on getting things to that final polished state. Who ever writes the song, their part pretty much stays the same. So when Frank or me write a song and present it to the band our individual part pretty much stays the same but it is everybody else’s part that seems to evolve a lot in the arrangement process. We let everyone in the band pretty much come up with their own parts but if we as a composer have something specific in our head we throw that at them too to see if they would try this little twist on that. We really do try out every little angle and tempo to get things to their optimum.”
So does a track sometimes come out totally different then you had initially thought?
FW: “Always. It is always better then I thought it would be initially. When I write a piece I hear the piano part and when I think it is cool I bring to the band. And then it goes through this arrangement-process and it just becomes way better then it was originally.”
SW: “Frank’s tunes are probably the most challenging for us to work up just because they are eeuh…”
FW: “… so weird” [laughs]
SW: “He has what we call Frank chords. A lot of his chords are simply not real chords [chuckles], they don’t have names or if they did it is something like C-sharp diminished flat five 711 sharp 13 over a B-flat base. They are just amazing chords and some of them for me as a guitar player are really fun and challenging to figure out what the hell he wants. His tunes are a lot of fun to work out.”
FW: “They do take a long time to work out.”
SW: “Yes, they take longer but that is good because the end result is pretty amazing. My tunes are a bit more straightforward, more verse-chorus verse-chorus.”
FW: “But with Stan’s tunes, he comes in and plays it and then he will map out his drum part, his rhythm idea and it turns out to be something completely different then you thought it would be. And you are really scratching your head...”
SW: “Yeah, I have a lot of drum ideas.”
FW: “His ideas are just off-the-wall but they sound really good you know.”
Ah, so that is the reason why you can’t hold on to your drummers because you got yourself a frustrated drummer cum guitar player?
FW: “We did have this one drummer leaving saying: “There are too many drummers in this band!”. But hey, everybody gets it equally from us. We are all tough on each other. Everyone’s part gets the same scrutiny. Basically, if you are married to your part you couldn’t work in this band. You got to be flexible.”
(continued...)